My sitemate finished her 27 months of service last week. Sending her on her way was one of my more bittersweet Peace Corps experiences. But I have plenty of happy and rewarding memories of our time together to help me survive the winter without her.
I am aware that that last sentence reads like the unhappy ending to some sort of teenage melodrama so let me rephrase: I will miss her gas heat, reliable electricity and the 4 burners on her stove. I am far too practical to resort to crying jags. (Haha.)
Leslie taught me some important PCV survival skills:
There is no such thing as too much toilet paper. One should have at least six rolls in reserve at any given time.
Sometimes the only way to recover from a particularly rough day is make obscene quantities of popcorn and watch Mama Mia. (Singing along with Meryl Streep is optional. Sorta.)
Whenever at a loss about what to make for dinner, there will always be surplus of chicken noodle soup in the pantry.
Leslie also made my life just a little bit easier:
She read The Economist magazines my mother sent so that I didn’t have to.
She always did the washing up. (I have always had a tendency to never do my dishes.)
She single-handedly taught the majority of the shopkeepers in our city the English words for most of the foodstuffs on my shopping lists.
She left me an incredible collection of DVDs (albeit frustratingly non-sequential ones.)
She left me her internet-enabled phone. Which will be awesome. As soon as I figure out how to use it…
But the more entertaining aspects of our give and take relationship aside, I am going to miss her more than I am willing to admit in cyberspace. We made a great team. It takes a special sort of person to serve in this region. And she made it the two full years.
Enjoy that steak (and the indoor plumbing), Leslie. You’ve earned it. J
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
0 comments:
Post a Comment